Not So Light Lenten Reflections

Week 4

What a Mouth...

If you are a regular reader of the Bible, or, perhaps, have a favorite devotional you have read repeatedly over the years, you may have experienced the phenomenon I'm about to talk about. It's the strange thing that happens periodically, at least for me, when I'm suddenly confronted by a scripture verse or a sentence in a devotional that I know I must have read many times before but I feel like I'm seeing it for the first time. As absurd as I know it must be, when this occurs, I internally blurt out, “Where did that come from? Was that there before? I'm pretty sure it wasn't!” Of course, it was there before, but before that moment I probably wasn't ready to see/read/hear/understand it and, now for some reason, I am. The time is right.

My last “Where did that come from?” moment occurred recently when I came across Luke 21:14-15 in my time in scripture:

Settle it therefore in your minds not to meditate beforehand how to answer, for I will give you a mouth and wisdom, which none of your adversaries will be able to withstand or contradict.

Jesus is talking to his disciples about the time coming when the temple in Jerusalem will be destroyed and persecution and imprisonment will follow. As sometimes happens in Jesus' teachings, he talks about two events at once. Here, he talks simultaneously about the temple, which would be destroyed in 70 A.D., and his second coming at the end of time. Both events would be difficult for his followers and would require huge amounts of trust in God to get through those times. Though the word “trust” is not in the above scripture, for some reason it shouted “Trust!” to me as I read this verse, seemingly for the first time.

Like many off-the-scale introverts, I'm very much an internal processor. Meditating beforehand is how I operate. Most of my conversations have been rehearsed multiple times before I open my mouth. In corporate settings, it has been suggested that supervisors supply questions for meetings ahead of time to all employees that are to attend the meeting. This allows those introverts, often deep thinkers with excellent ideas, to prepare what they might want to share at the meeting. If the questions are sprung cold on these introverts at the meeting, they are more likely to remain silent because they haven't had enough time to “meditate beforehand.”

But back to Luke...Of course I had read the verses before, but in my old NIV Bible where it says,

But make up your mind not to worry beforehand how you will defend yourselves...

The NIV allowed me to read these words as an emotional issue, worrying being something I have little control over. Easy, peasy, I could say. Just give it over to Jesus. Somehow, when I read the words in my ESV Bible, they had a much greater impact on me. Meditating, defined as to think deeply or carefully about something, to plan mentally or consider, seemed like something I was more responsible for. I was struck with some dismay at the wording of the verses, as though it was speaking directly to me. If it was, then I was being told to settle it in my mind not – NOT! – to do what I've always done, to rehearse, to plan mentally, to make sure I had all my words right before I opened my mouth. “Wait!” I wanted to shout, “Isn't thinking about what I want to say before I open my mouth a good thing?” Generally, yes, but in thinking on this scripture, I realized how much I was trusting myself and my intellect and deep thinking and my wording of things. I didn't leave any room for what God might want me to say in any given situation. Being somewhat new to this true trust thing*, was I willing to learn another way of speaking? The scripture in Luke says that Jesus himself with give me “a mouth and a wisdom”, which none of my adversaries would be able to withstand or contradict. A mouth! Like “She's got some mouth on her.” That sounded sassy and more than a little scary to me.

In contemplating these words, I became acutely aware how much of my communicative energy is tied up in wanting to say the right thing according to my definition of what that right thing might be. God was reminding me that He could be leaned upon, trusted totally to allow me to say what I am supposed to say, what He would want me to say, in any given situation. I might not be facing the adversaries of end times persecution in my verbal interactions, but for introverts like me, most conversations have an adversarial vibe to them. Social situations with friends, difficult conversations with family members, uncomfortable conflicts with neighbors, random incidents with complete strangers – they all require a communicative energy that if I have to muster up myself, I will always fall short. Did I believe that God could give me a mouth and wisdom for all these situations? Was I willing to ask for His words, given in His timing, in all my conversations instead of automatically defaulting to my internal processing? Could I trust Him with this part of my being? After all, He knows how He made this introvert. I guess I can trust Him to give me a mouth...

*See Week 1 for my “Oh, Sweetie, you've never trusted me...” epiphany.

 

Not So Light Lenten Reflections

Week 3

Pet Trusts

Pet trusts...we all have 'em, even if we are not aware of them. They can be helpful in our growing in trusting God, but they can also potentially trip us up in that journey. No, they have nothing to do with our confidence in leaving meat to marinate on the counter with the canine family member lurking in the kitchen. But they are not unlike our pet dogs' easy and trusting reliance on us for their immediate needs and general well-being. Our pet trusts involve those areas of our lives where trusting God is not a struggle, or, at least, not a painful one. Because of how we are made, how we have grown up, our family patterns, structure, and experiences, there are certain areas in which we find it easy – or at least, easier – to trust God. We may have many of these pet trusts, or a few, but they can all be helpful in growing our trust in other areas.

Despite my atypical family upbringing, I never lacked for anything. We could be considered poor by some metrics, but we never felt poor. Mom was good with money as were my grandparents. We had a home with a mortgage that got paid in a timely manner. We always had enough food. There were toys and fun outings. We went to Catholic schools, and the tuition money always seemed to be there. As a result, as an adult, I never worried about money or financial matters in general. A pet trust...

I found out I was at risk for a certain cancer when I was in my early twenties. I had screenings and checkups for years until I did, in fact, develop that cancer, in my mid thirties, after having been told I was past the age when I was most likely to get it. Since then, CTs, MRIs, and blood tests have always been a cause for concern. Yes, scanxiety is a thing. By the time primary cancer #4 surfaced, I had little trust that scans and tests would ever be routine or normal. They had often proved to be a harbinger of another medical crisis. There were, in fact, normal scans and tests over the years, but they always took me by surprise, being a cause for anticipatory anxiety despite any eventual good result. I just had difficulty mustering any trust that the results would be normal. Not a pet trust...

We all have different experiences that form our ability to trust. We also have different experiences that lead to huge holes where trust should be but isn't. Some people might make the case that pet trusts – those easy places where we assume the best will eventually appear – isn't real trust at all. If it's easy, is it truly trust? Shouldn't we feel some spiritual effort as we lean into God at all times, in all areas of our lives, the easy places as well as the hard? If we look at our pet trust as OUR trust, something we have accomplished, achieved on our own, then, yes, it can be a potential problem. We can fall into a certain kind of pride that we, not God, are responsible for our trusting confidence in any particular area. But if we acknowledge God's part in bringing about the circumstances of our pet trust, then it can be a helpful tool in developing trust in other areas where trust does not come easy, in those places where we find huge holes devoid of trust.

As long as I didn't see my family's financial provision as something we were solely responsible for, that it was, in fact, a gift from God, then that pet trust would have the potential to encourage me to trust in areas where trust did not come easy. Yes, God encouraged godly character traits in me and my family that taught us to be good with money as well as showing us that He never left us unprovided for, but I think I always knew that my financial security had more to do with God than keeping track of my income and expenditures. I should come away with the belief that if God could be trusted in areas of financial provision, then He could be trusted as well in the area of ______. (Fill in the blank, Mary!) But easier said than done...

There are other pet trusts I've been blessed with – I can easily trust God for healthy church choices, wonderful friends, good experiences for my kids, wonderful neighborhood and housing situations – all of which have encouraged me to trust God in the tougher places. Like foot holds on climbing walls and rungs on monkey bars, pet trusts give me something to cling to and help me maneuver over those scary placed in between. I still struggle with trusting God in areas involving medical issues. My husband's diagnosis provided new opportunities to grow in trust for me as well as for him. Over all the years of my various medical journeys, one area where I have been growing in trust has been that God would provide excellent medical care. Since my first diagnosis, God has led me to amazing doctors, often in down right miraculous ways. Time and again, without much anxiety or intensive research, I have fallen into the hands of some of the best medical doctors and medical staff imaginable. In the past year of my husband's journey, again, God has led us on a direct and relatively easy path to great medical care. Yeah, I still get scanxiety for myself and my husband's labs and MRIs, but I am amazed at the ease with which I can now trust God to provide the necessary medical intervention for whatever lies ahead. A new pet trust in the making?

When I am afraid, I put my trust in you.  
In God, whose word I praise, in God I trust; I shall not be afraid.  
What can flesh do to me?   - Psalm 56:3,4 ESV

 

Not So Light Lenten Reflections

Week 2

The BIG TRUST

My dad died suddenly when I was a year old, leaving me and my pregnant mother to figure out life going forward. Me, being a one-year-old and having no memory of that time, I didn't have a lot of say in what that life would look like. But my mom was a woman of faith and she trusted God to help her do the figuring out. Her parents moved in with us, she had my brother, and life did go forward. My brother and I were taken care of during the day by Grandma and Grandpa, both doing an exceptional job, having practiced on five kids of their own. We spent time with our working mom in the evenings and on weekends. On the whole, I think my brother and I would agree, we had a good childhood. Mom had trusted God and He had provided. It was a big trust, but it wasn't The BIG TRUST...

The BIG TRUST is the trust we each have to grapple with personally. We also most likely will have to grapple with it vicariously as those close to us personally deal with it. It revolves around our common end and the fact, like my father, we all die. We may die far too young and suddenly, like my dad, or we may live to a ripe old age and slowly fade out. Whatever the means of our demise, the end is the same. We die. And then, what? This is where The BIG TRUST enters in.

Somewhere in my youth, probably during my teen years, my mother showed me a note and a card she had saved from the time of my father's death. At that time there was a neighbor who lived down the street that my father enjoyed talking to. He had told my mother that he had interesting spiritual conversations with this neighbor who was a Baptist pastor. When my dad died, this neighbor wrote a comforting note to my mom and in it were some verses from the Bible. As my mom showed me the card, she recited the verses without looking at them, saying she had taken such comfort from them that she had committed them to memory. This struck me as a not-so-typical thing for my Catholic mother to have done, and it made an impression on me. The verses she quoted were from the gospel of John -

Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father's house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also.

-John 14:1-3

My memory of that conversation with my mother made me think that she had grappled with the BIG TRUST, that that scripture in the note card had given her both hope and comfort as to where my suddenly departed dad had gone off to. My father was in the Father's house, in a “room” prepared by Jesus Himself. And, if the scripture is to be believed, Jesus came and took Dad to Himself just so Dad could be with Jesus. No wonder the verses start with the words “Let not your hearts be troubled”! How could one's heart be troubled with such a great promise for eternity?

Having survived four primary cancers, the BIG TRUST has always loomed large for me, though in my case at the time, perhaps it was more like The BIG ACQUIESCENCE or The BIG RESIGNATION. But in the time since my epiphany regarding true trust, I like to think I have grown in my ability to trust God for everything, including The BIG TRUST, and, at the moment, I really, really need to lean into that trust...

Six months ago, my husband was diagnosed with an extremely aggressive brain tumor. The prognosis is grim. Three weeks from first symptoms to brain biopsy, followed by brain surgery, radiation, biologic infusions and oral chemo, he has gone from miles of daily walks outdoors to moving about the house with wheelchair and walker. There have been a myriad of opportunities to trust God – for good doctors, for effective treatments with minimal side effects, for practical support and prayer support, for good weather for medical appointments. When my husband could no longer walk by himself, our son moved in with us to take on the physical day to day needs of his dad. Our daughters have provided all manner of practical and emotional support. Friends have come around us and prayed us through it all. At this moment, the tumor has been declared “stable” by those who know enough to make such a declaration. We are thankful for all the ways God has responded to our trusting Him, and I am grateful that I've had the opportunity to exercise some of my newly acquired trust muscles.

Right now, my husband and I are looking at the BIG TRUST up close, he facing it personally, me looking at it vicariously as he grapples with it. And it really does feel like...The...BIG...TRUST. It is huge for me, and I can only image what it is like for my husband. But as I dwell in those verses from the gospel of John, there is a fleshing out of The BIG TRUST. Can we trust God and receive from Him whatever we need to not let our hearts be troubled? That's a big one. Do we believe in Him; believe in Jesus; really believe? Can we imagine the rooms in the Father's house, the ones that are prepared for us – for me, for my husband? Do we believe and trust Jesus that He has prepared a place for us and will see to it personally that we get there? And, oh, do we trust that Jesus wants us to be where He is for all eternity in the same way that He wants us to be with Him now, in our present daily life? Yeah, that's a really BIG TRUST...but not too big a trust for the size of our God.

***

I thought about writing and posting this for Good Friday - Death, then Resurrection, Eternal Life – themes all ultimately caught up in The BIG TRUST. But as I thought more about it, all the posts after this will make the other trusts look easier if we look at The BIG TRUST first. And that TRUST has eternal significance. So I decided this was the week to write and post it. To paraphrase a quote from the movie, When Harry Met Sally, when you realize you are going to spend the rest of eternity with Somebody, you want to start thinking about the rest of eternity as soon as possible.

 

Not So Light Lenten Reflections

Week 1

“Oh,Sweetie...”

Part 2

How long does it take for the dirt to settle in a trench that had been twelve feet deep? Estimates vary, but two to five years seems to be the average numbers we saw in our research. I considered these numbers as we went about our plans to put our house on the market. Our realtor suggested an “as is” clause when we finally listed our property. We also had mounded and seeded and watered the filled dirt to show some attempt at reclaiming our front lawn.

In the weeks between the trench digging and the meeting with the realtor, I threw myself a spiritual pity party, one of those “Woe is me! God, You just don't get what we need here.” I've been in places of spiritual despondency before, and I still prayed. Because I've always seen prayer as talking to God, my praying now resembled the difficult conversation one might have with someone close to you that you are in conflict with at the moment. I grumbled and I cried and I sulked and, finally, after a few weeks, I felt spent enough to pray “Oh, Lord, I just want to be able to trust you again.” I immediately felt a peace I had not had for awhile and I “heard” the Lord say to me, “Oh, Sweetie, you've never trusted me...”

Now, I should probably explain that when I say I “heard” the Lord, I don't mean an audible voice. Usually, when I “hear” the Lord, there is a sense of someone - not me - putting words in my mind that I recognize as being too wise for me to have come up with on my own. Often it happens when I am reading scripture and the words jump off the page and take on a wisdom and meaning that I had not seen before. Sometimes there is a new insight and a sense of peace regarding something I'm praying about and I know God is present at that time. And sometimes, like in this instance, there are very clear and surprising words that pop into my head that cause me to say, “God, is that you?”

“Oh, Sweetie, you've never trusted me...”

When I heard those words I was immediately struck by three things almost simultaneously. One was that I knew what I had heard was absolutely true, that I didn't know how to trust God. There was absolutely no feeling of condemnation in the words I heard, only love and tenderness. I really did, at that moment, feel like God's Sweetie, and He was just telling me something that I was finally able to hear, something that I had really needed to know for some time, and now the right time had come for me to receive it. Secondly, I had a glimpse of what true trust in God was for perhaps the first time in my spiritual life. And thirdly – and this took the form of a question to God – what was that thing I had been doing all those years when I thought I had been trusting God?

I started to examine that third thing first. I asked the Lord to show me what I had confused as trust for all those years I thought I had been trusting. What I began to see was that in all the times of my life when I knew I needed to look to God, when I needed to depend upon Him in health crises, relational issues and practical issues, I could only see the passive side of “trust”. I was good at being resigned. I was good at being submitted. I was good at being compliant. I was good at being acquiescent. Acquiescent is defined as accepting something reluctantly but without protest. Yes, I was especially good at that. On the whole, I had seen “trust” as something passive that was put upon me, that I had no choice in, something I reluctantly accepted. And I think God blessed my compliance, my incomplete “trust”, knowing that was all I knew how to give during those times. But was any of this true trust? Now, I had had a glimpse of the active side of trust, true trust as being a joyful movement toward God, an expectation of His hand over my life and an expectation of His working in whatever my situation. Trust now looked like an interesting mix of actively leaning into God and resting in a place of joyful peace rather than passivity.

In the weeks that followed the sewer fiasco, I immersed myself in scriptures about trust and asked God to transition me from the purely passive acquiescent side of trust to the fully active, often joyous side of trust. I was somewhat amused, definitely humbled, and a little embarrassed to be such a latecomer to true trust. I had just celebrated my fiftieth year as a Believer and one of the first scriptures I had ever memorized was Proverbs 3:5, Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. I guess I was trusting the Lord with only part of my heart and leaning on my own understanding to shoulder the rest.

I prayed about and contemplated true trust during that time we were preparing to sell our old home and buy a new one near Minneapolis. I trusted the Lord to bring a buyer that could overlook the mound of now newly greened grass in the front yard. I trusted the Lord to find us a townhome that would meet our needs as we grew older. He sent us twelve viewers on day one of our house listing. He sent us five offers on day two, all above asking price. The one we accepted was high enough to almost fully cover the cost of the sewer replacement, and the new buyer graciously accepted the front lawn in progress. On the Minneapolis end, we found our almost perfect townhome and were able to schedule two closings within a few days of each other. I came
to know that God is good and completely to be trusted. How sweet to be His Sweetie...

Trust in the Lord with all your heart,

and do not lean on your own understanding.

In all your ways acknowledge him,

and he will make straight your paths.

- Proverbs 3:5,6

 

Not So Light Lenten Reflections

Week 1

God's Sovereignty Problem – An Opportunity to Trust

Part 1

The puddle around the drain in our unfinished basement was small, barely a foot in diameter, and no larger than the one that appeared in the same place six months earlier. It didn't look like a big deal, and it certainly didn't look like a opportunity to learn a whole new level of trusting God. But it was a big deal, and what I learned about trust was even a bigger deal.

* * *

I thought I'd write a series of Lenten reflections this year about trusting God, what I thought it was and what it probably actually is and why I need it more now than ever. Someone reading this might benefit from my sharing, but, honestly, I really need to write this down for me, to remind myself of how big God is and how worthy He is of my trust. I usually call this series “Light Lenten Reflections” but some of these reflections will be not so light. But back to the puddle in the basement...

* * *

We called the rooter people we had contacted six months previously and told them the puddle was back. This shouldn't be, they said. Something is going on that a simple rooting out won't fix. Within 24 hours, they had dug a trench in our front yard, from front porch, across the lawn, through the road in front of our house and into our neighbor's yard. The trench was twelve feet deep and almost as wide. The sewer pipe running from our basement no longer sloped down to the main sewer line in our neighbor's yard. Over the years, the pipe had settled in such a way that it now sloped from the main sewer line into our basement. The village engineers and various consultants were called in and together with the rooter people came up with a plan to remedy the problem – just redo the entire sewer outlet in our basement, put in 50 feet of large sewer piping that wasn't there previously, knock a hole in the foundation to raise the outlet of the pipe four feet higher than what it was previously. Oh, and because all of the needed work was on our pipe and our property, we'd get to pay for it all!

Now this story might seem like a run-of-the-mill crisis that all homeowner face now and then, though maybe a slightly bigger one than usual. But for me, it was devastating and for a short time seriously affected my relationship with God in what I've come to call His sovereignty problem. If I believe God is sovereign - and I do – then He knew all about this sewer pipe and the gigantic hole in the front lawn and He let it all happen anyway. He knew about the five years leading up to this crisis and how our life had been put on hold so many times in those years. I was not shy about telling God how really, really upset I was that this was happening now, again. Five years earlier, when my husband and I retired, we had made plans to move to the Minneapolis area to be closer to our kids and grandchildren. We started to get rid of stuff and paint rooms. Then I had a cancer diagnosis and subsequent surgery. On the road to recovery, but before I could get painting again, I had another cancer diagnosis unrelated to the previous one, and this time it was six months of chemo followed by major surgery and a year's recovery. But recover I did, and as soon as I could climb ladders again, I was back to painting. Then the pandemic hit. In addition to dealing with the problem of showing our house and looking for a new one in the midst of high Covid numbers, did we really want to make the dozen trips to Menards and Home Depot that everyone moving into a new place seems required to make? We decided to put off our move one more time.

Now, with Covid numbers dwindling, we were finally ready to sell our house. In the days before the puddle reappeared, we had started organizing our stuff in the basement in preparation for packing. We were looking at towns in the Minneapolis area we though we might want to move to. We had a realtor picked out and we were ready to put our house on the market...the house with the 50 feet of new sewer pipe in the basement that now had displaced our carefully organized pre-move packing...the house that now had a twelve foot hole in the front lawn...

...I was not happy with God...

Tomorrow

Part 2

Oh, Sweetie...

 

Questions, Questions...I've Got Questions

3,298...

If this were Jeopardy, the category would be titled “Biblical numbers”. The answer would be “What is the number of questions found in the King James Version of the Bible?”

3,298 questions...

The Book of Job is the stand out winner in the question contest with 329. (Surprise, surprise!) Jeremiah has 195 questions, Isaiah, 190, Psalms, 163, 1 Samuel, 157, and Genesis, 149. The gospels contain 630 questions, with Matthew the winner at 177, followed by John at 167, Luke close behind at 165 and Mark trailing with 121.*

Depending on the translation and whether you include the apocryphal/deuterocanonical books in your count, the total number of questions in the Bible may vary, but there is no getting away from the fact that questions and questioning are very biblical. Some of the questions are voiced by the writer of a particular book, others come from the mouth of God, the Yahweh of the Old Testament, the Jesus of the New. It would appear that it is fine with God that we ask Him questions, but it is also expected that we should be fine with God asking us questions as well. Read any of the chapters at the end of the Book of Job. God asks a head-spinning number of questions of Job, more than the many questions that Job had asked God in the early chapters of the book. Just count the question marks in Chapter 36, then count the question marks in Chapters 6 and 7. Lots of questions. Fortunately for Job, this mutual questioning ends well. God takes issue with the way Job's friends spoke about God, but God appears to be fine with all of Job's questioning, saying to Job's friends, “And my servant Job shall pray for you, for I will accept his prayer not to deal with you according to your folly. For you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has.” (Job 42:8b) Job gets a shout out from the Lord God Himself despite his questioning or, perhaps, because of his questioning. Good news for us as well as for Job: Questioning, if done correctly – face-to-face, before God and toward God – counts as prayer.**

This strange Lenten series has been about asking questions in a Luddite-like manner. The basic questions have been focused on what we let into our lives in the way of technology or even just “stuff” that clutters up our closets or our minds. Some of these questions were: For each new technology - “machine” - we let into our lives, are we losing something valuable, something of quality that the “old way” of doing it provided? How can this loss be avoided? When we can't live without the new technology, how do we decide to adapt, to use it in a way that does not diminish our lives and relationships? To what extent are we in danger of growing “mechanical in head and in heart, as well as hand”? And then there is my favorite question: “Will the Kingdom of God be any closer to existing on earth as it is in heaven if I have this tool?” These questions apply to our specific life style choices, but they also hone our skills at asking more complex questions and give us a new comfort level with the process of asking and answering questions on an ongoing deeper spiritual level. So as I end this Lenten Luddite series, I encourage us to take our questions to the next level, to realize that all our questions can be turned into Job-like prayer, sometimes maybe even without the pain and angst. All our questions are better questions when we direct them toward God.

Lord, how much screen time is too much?

Lord, do I really need another book, a new phone? No to the book, yes to phone? I kind of wanted it the other way around.

Lord, what can I do to simplify my life?

What are You calling me to let go of?

What or who are you calling me to connect to?

Lord, where am I going to get the relational energy to connect with all the people you put in my life each day? Did you forget I'm an introvert? Oh, right, you made me that way. You'll l give me all I need to pull it off? Of course. Thanks for the reminder. I'm glad I asked...

*The numbers come from J.L. Hancock's book All the Questions in the Bible as mentioned in Beth Moore's study The Quest.

**I've used the following passage from Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering by Timothy Keller in my devotional blog posts twice before. Here it is for a third time. Yeah, it's that good, and Job's questions are part of the mix of the doubts and complaints and the yelling and screaming Keller talks about:

But why would God be so affirming of Job? Job cursed the day he was born, challenged God's wisdom, cried out and complained bitterly, expressed deep doubts. It didn't seem that Job was a paragon of steady faith throughout. Why would God vindicate him like that?' The first reason is that God is gracious and forgiving. But the crucial thing to notice is this: Through it all, Job never stopped praying. Yes, he complained, but he complained to God. He doubted, but he doubted to God. He screamed and yelled, but he did it in God's presence. No matter how much in agony he was, he continued to address God. He kept seeking him. And in the end, God said Job triumphed. How wonderful that our God sees the grief and anger and questioning, and is still willing to say “you triumphed” - not because it was all fine, not because Job's heart and motives were always right, but because Job's doggedness in seeking the face and presence of God meant that the suffering did not drive him away from God but toward him. And that made all the difference. As John Newton said, if we are not getting much out of going to God in prayer, we will certainly get nothing out of staying away.

 

Human Connection in a Kiosk World

My husband and I frequent fast food restaurants on an embarrassingly regular basis. Post pandemic, with the rapid rise of ordering kiosks, it has become more and more difficult to order from a person at a register and pay cash for our lunch. We have found that at certain times of the day, if we hang around the register looking like hungry people of a certain age, someone will appear from the kitchen area and take our order the old fashioned way. Since we are regulars at one McDonald's, we tend to see the same young girl emerge from the kitchen to help us. On one visit, after an ordering glitch on the counter register, my husband teased her and said he bet she was wishing we had used the kiosk. She looked at us wide-eyed, slowly shook her head and silently mouthed the word “No!” We all laughed, finished the order and we went on to our table, she back to the kitchen. My husband and I spent lunch speculating on what her emphatic “No!” meant. Had we saved her from some unpleasant task in the kitchen? Did kiosk ordering create more problems behind the scenes than a register order? Or perhaps the very existence of her job depended upon people such as us, hanging around the register looking hungry and kiosk-avoidant.

My husband attends a men's group at another McDonald's where only kiosk ordering is available at the early morning hour they meet. Since he usually orders only coffee, he balks at ordering on the kiosk and paying for one coffee with a credit card. He instead goes through the drive-thru, orders his coffee, talks to a real person who accepts his cash and hands him his coffee. At that hour, the drive-thru is a well-oiled machine and the employees are still fresh on their shifts, and are friendly and happy to serve. My husband then parks his car and carries his coffee inside the restaurant to meet up with his group that has ordered their breakfasts via the kiosk, sometimes successfully, sometimes not.

These are just two examples of the last remnants of people-to-people connections that we used to take for granted. True, we probably didn't have meaningful in-depth conversations when ordering past Shamrock Shakes, but we did interact with a real person. Self-checkouts at the library have eliminated the interesting conversations I used to have with the desk clerks about books they read and recommended or questions they had about books I was checking out - “Oh, I read her other book. It was a great read!” “You fly fish!!!??” “I think we just got a new book in you might like.” Self-checkouts at the supermarket and ordering apps on phones also have diminished the number of times a weeks we physically interact with others.

Part of the original Luddite rebellion was due to the fact that the mill owners lost sight of the people they employed, ignoring their concerns and their needs. The Luddite weavers were used to an apprentice-style learning model where people would come alongside others to teach and model what a skilled craftsman should do to produce a quality product. The mill owners were interested mainly in rapid production and cheap overhead and would hire those who could work fast but not necessarily work precisely. They looked at the product rather than the producer. What are some of the Luddite-like questions we need to ask today, when faced with a kiosk, an app, a self-checkout? What are we losing in simple human interaction in this machine-dominated workplace? What are some things we can do to not lose the connection we as human beings are meant to have with each other, even if they are just fleeting moments in our day? To return to Thomas Carlyle's quote from my first post in this series, how have we “grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand?” What choices can we make to change that?

Despite being people of a certain age, my husband and I do, in fact, know how to use an ordering kiosk, a self-serve checkout and the scanners at the library. And, as both of us are high on the introvert scale, it is easy for us to be tempted on some days to avoid the human interaction. The machines around us allow us that option, but it doesn't mean it's good for us. We can choose the traditional checkout, even when they are few and far between. We can interact with librarians and store clerks. We can choose to spend more time looking at people's faces than looking at our screens. We were created to know one another, to interact with the people around us. Some we are called to know in depth, to really know. Others we connect with oh so briefly and superficially, but we are called to that as well. At best we do it all imperfectly, but we were made to do it, to look each other in the eye, to smile, to exchange pleasantries, and on occasion, to shake our heads slowly and mouth an emphatic “No!”